CCC's Street Art Contest #292 "The inevitable Hourglass" - Regg Salgado, Ajuda, Portugal

Good morning, friends!

Welcome to another post in the Street Art community!

One afternoon last week, as I was leaving work, I decided to start exploring a low-income neighborhood located just over a kilometer away.

Although my time was somewhat limited, I still had the chance to come across one of the many graffiti pieces that are visible on the facades of some of the houses in this neighborhood.

And the theme couldn’t be more timely. At a time when low-income families and young people just starting their professional lives are facing enormous difficulties.

Currently, largely due to the growing demand for housing in major urban centers, prices—whether for purchasing with a bank loan or for renting—have risen to levels that are practically unaffordable given average salaries.

Fortunately, my situation is a bit different. I purchased my home with a bank loan back in July 2010. More than 15 years later, prices here in my neighborhood have more than doubled. A true escalation, with no apparent “end in sight,” because the construction market in Portugal has suffered a marked reduction in both public and private investment.

The growth in the housing stock recorded in the late 1990s—driven by the International Exposition held in the eastern part of Lisbon—led to the construction of many buildings using the available labor force at the time, once the Expo had concluded.

All these years later, little to nothing has been done in terms of new social housing.

Wages have not kept pace with the markets, and with an influx of foreign residents—particularly digital nomads—who, with greater economic power, have invariably “pushed” families and young people to the outskirts. Economic actors have simply adapted to the markets.

Just to give you an idea, I started paying off my mortgage in 2010, and the monthly payment has been going down, because with a spread rate of 0.9%—which individual buyers can no longer qualify for these days—it ends up making it practically impossible for young people who don’t yet have a substantial income, or those who live alone, to even consider buying a home.

The theme is explored by artist Regg Salgado, who uses it to illustrate a sandglass-like image... where unpaired shoes pile up at the bottom of a giant shoe, which could represent the world. A solitary shoe left behind brings to mind a memory from a few years ago of a two-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi, who was pulled from the sand on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, near the Aegean Sea, on September 2, 2015 (link).

We are becoming increasingly selfish, and we fail to see the suffering of those right beside us. Is this how societies evolve and consider them to be advanced?